Steven Warwick is an artist and musician and writer based in Berlin. His new audio-visual mixtape Nadir was released via the delinear platform on the acclaimed label PAN.

Nadir fuses reflective poetics with diaristic snapshots and fragmented melodies recorded during a residency in LA. The release captures the tensions, unease and uncertainty in a contemporary setting. Live, Warwick presents a new show with visuals in which he reworks the tracks in real time for a club setting, in a similar manner to his previous Heatsick project: loops and rhythms are stretched and worked out on the dancefloor with focus on the human voice to dizzying and psychedelic effect.

“Complex and enthralling, swallowing whole dancefloors of people into deep, hypnotic grooves for hours on end in a rich, multi-sensory overload” – FACT

“This is dance music through and through, albeit probably unlike any you’ve heard before” - The Quietus

Friday, October 20, 2017; 8pm–midnightSaturday, October 21, 2017; 8pm–midnightSunday, October 22, 2017; 2–6pmTicket holders may come and go during all three live recording sessions$20 Guests / $12 MembersReserve tickets: member login or guest registration

The legendary psychedelic music rockers, The Red Krayola—founded Houston, Texas, 1966—will appear at The Lab. The lineup for the occasion will feature Mayo Thompson, as usual, and John McEntire of Tortoise, The Sea and Cake. They will record two new songs with texts by their longtime collaborators, the English Conceptual artists Art & Language. Sessions for “Born in Flames II” and “Sword of God II” will be open to the public. For band reference see theredkrayola.org

7-9pm, program starts promptly at 7:30pm$8 entry (no one turned away for lack of funds), free for membersReserve seats: member login or guest registration

The Black Aesthetic is a creative organization whose mission is to curate and assemble both a collective and distinct understanding of Black visual culture. Part of our ongoing programing is a 6-week screening of emerging filmmakers/video artists with discussion and audience Q/A. theblkaesthetic.com

SEASON III TBA

For us, The Black Aesthetic is TBA, meaning 'to be announced', 'to be assessed', and 'to be actualized'.

Thus, The Black Aesthetic (TBA) is a position of the yet to be announced. We eschew continuity in favor of exploration. In an interview for Film Quarterly, Michael Gillespie says, “I’m interested in the rendering of blackness or how black visual and expressive culture stages race not just asimpermeable fact, but as multidimensional and multidiscursive.” The Black Aesthetic is not interested in the already expressed face of the raced, but on the the multidimensional visual and expressive culture of blackness. This objective is not to clarify a theme as such, instead we are unambiguously creating a space where various distinct and dissonant black artistic expressions can live.

Jlin appeared first on Planet Mu's second volume of "Bangs & Works" compilation, which had a huge impact on electronic/club music, bringing footwork to a wider audience. A protegee of RP Boo, Jlin hails from Gary, Indiana, a place close yet distant enough from Chicago to allow her to develop a different perspective on the genre. Her debut album Dark Energy was named best album of 2015 by The Wire—and the new Black Origami is bursting with force, taking footwork to another level through dense rhythmic patterns and tension that overwhelm the listener. Jlin will premiere her live show at The Lab.

The music of drummer John Colpitts as Man Forever is explorative, innovative and fearless. A musician and composer equally versed in the disparate musical languages of DIY rock, improvisation, and contemporary classical, Colpitts (aka Kid Millions) has made an album that defies genre classification. Propulsive, elaborate drum arrangements (created with TIGUE Percussion) remain essential to Man Forever - on the songs of Play What They Want, they are augmented by voice and melody with contributions from Laurie Anderson, Yo La Tengo, and Mary Lattimore to name a few. Play What They Want represents the culmination of 25 years of musical engagement by one of New York’s most acclaimed percussionists.

The collaborative process, essential to Man Forever, requires the relinquishing of one’s ego for a greater purpose. In Play What They Want, Colpitts leverages a vast and talented stable of diverse collaborators to create a work that transcends the sum of its parts.

Join Artadia and Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, for a free public program at The Lab. Molesworth will visit San Francisco to participate in Art & Dialogue and visit with Artadia Awardees.

Helen Molesworth is the Chief Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, where she recently curated the first US retrospective of the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the monographic survey Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. From 2010–2014 she was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, where she assembled one person exhibitions of artists Steve Locke, Catherine Opie, Josiah McElheny, and Amy Sillman, and the group exhibitions Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957, Dance/Draw, and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. As head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museum, she presented an exhibition of photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP NY: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis 1987–1993. From 2002–2007 she was the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where she organized the first US retrospectives ofLouise Lawler and Luc Tuymans, as well as Part Object Part Sculpture, which examined the influence of Marcel Duchamp’s erotic objects. While Curator of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art from 2000–2002, she arranged Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, she is currently at work on an ambitious exhibition inspired by the American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his 1962 essay “White Elephant vs. Termite Art.”

Born in New Zealand in 1939 and living in the US since 1973, Annea Lockwood is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Her music has been presented in many venues and festivals, including the 2016 Tectonics/BBC Festival, Glasgow, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, the Tactile Paths 2017 festival, Berlin, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn and the Israeli Center for the Digital Arts, Holon.

Recent projects include In Our Name, a collaboration with Thomas Buckner based on poems by prisoners in Guantánamo; Water and Memory, composed for the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Israel;Wild Energy, in collaboration with Bob Bielecki - a site-specific installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric and mammalian infra and ultra sound sources. She was a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award. Her music has been issued on CD, vinyl and online on the Lovely Music, Black Truffle, New World, Ambitus, 3Leaves, EM and other labels. annealockwood.com

Danielle de Picciotto and Alexander Hacke have been leading a nomadic life since 2010, with no permanent home and travelling from one city to the next. The reason for their restlessness is the overall gentrification, the annihilation of individualism, the rising costs of living and the relentless sellout by the mainstream entertainment industry. "Artists need to find new ways of working now-a-days in order to upkeep integrity and autonomy. The old patterns no longer function.”

The uncompromising decision to abandon their home has since determined their work. Their search for external & internal clarity, researching archaic principles and philosophies has helped them master the rigors of the road.

At The Lab they will be presenting their album "Perseverantia.” The album was recorded in the Californian Mojave desert and is mostly instrumental, with a few spoken-word lyrics by Danielle de Picciotto. Together with the throat-singing by Alexander Hacke, the purring and squeaking of the hurdy-gurdy and an ether-plucking harp, melancholic violin melodies and the hum and growl of bass and guitar, one is placed in an acoustic world of mysteries, which floats out of the loudspeakers like an epic movie, both disturbing and mesmerizing.

Vienna is the home of Radian, Martin Brandlmayr (drums, electronics), John Norman (bass), and Martin Siewert (guitars, electronics), who have been influenced by and shaped the city’s vivid scene of electronica in the early 2000s. The title of their most recent album, On Dark Silent Off, is a nod to Ad Reinhardt, whose art and theory has been influential on the trio. The juxtaposition of extremes (on/off) is present in Radian’s work: the contrast between light and darkness; and in musical terms, sound and silence and brightness/darkness of timbre.

Radian creates a field of tension between extreme dynamics, freely improvised parts and meticulous construction, an inherent contrast between soft sounds and sharp edits. Radian’s recording/creative process takes a central role in shaping the pieces. It is a two-fold process of creating material through improvisation, sound experiments and processing on the one hand, and a routine of carefully selecting and editing this material on the other. It is often the case that mere snippets are used out of hours of sound material. The contrast between the magic of the moment, spontaneous live performance and its subsequent careful construction shape the quality of the pieces.

Light Field is an international exhibition of recent and historical moving image art on celluloid, held in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are artist run and collectively organized by: Samuel Breslin, Emily Chao, Zachary Epcar, Trisha Low, tooth, and Syd Staiti. We return to The Lab with our second annual edition to be held on December 7th - 10th 2017.

A festival dedicated to the music of Wadada Leo Smith. It is a source for premiering new and existing works, and the celebration of information through seminars, video and film presentation. This is to instill information that will address the historical and inspirational sources of the new works.

CREATE occurs annually in New Haven, CT during the month of April, and later in the year in other regions in the United States. There, CREATE incorporates a community of musicians in those selected sites. Also, each festival opens with young developing artist’ ensemble, who are assigned to compose a new work to be premiered at CREATE.

Our outreach program for young children and young developing artists takes place through the production of performances and workshops in local nursery schools, kindergarten schools and neighborhood schools of music.

All this is made possible with the support of The Doris Duke Artist Award of 2016-2019.

The Lab presents a program of new and recent works by composer Tashi Wada performed by cellist Charles Curtis, bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, and Wada with special guest Julia Holter.

The program collects three, new and recent, long-form works by composer Tashi Wada that explore different and diverging aspects of tuning and tonality. Valence (2016), written for cellist Charles Curtis, isolates and reharmonizes the natural overtones of a single string, destabilizing and fusing tone and timbre through a delicate alchemy. Witness (2017), written for bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, draws out the relationship between an array of scales and tetrachords (four-note segments of scales) found traditionally in Greek, Persian, and Arabic musics, in combination with hybrid and invented scales, through repetition, variation, and improvisation. Wada’s performance for keyboard, voice, and sirens with guest musician Julia Holter focuses on the outer edges of historical, non-equal temperaments, eliciting a more distant, uneven sense of tonality.

Bob Ostertag makes a rare San Francisco appearance playing solo and in duo with longtime collaborator Fred Frith. Ostertag, who has been working with keyboard-less synthesizers since the mid-1970s, will play the latest iterations of his many and varied instruments.

Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published more than twenty-five CDs of music, two DVDs, and five books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, postmodernist John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, transgender cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, and many others. Ostertag first began publishing as a journalist covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. His most recent book is Sex Science Self: A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity (U Mass Press 2016). His previous book, Raising expectations (And Raising Hell) (Verso 2012) was about labor union organizing in Las Vegas. Co-authored with Jane McAlevey, The Nation magazine named it the Most Valuable Book of 2012. bobostertag.wordpress.com